To Preserve Is Not to Select

Epilogue To Preserve is Not To Select His nature was too large, too ready to conceive regions beyond his own experience, to rest at once in the easy explanation, ‘madness,’ whenever a consciousness showed some fullness and conviction where his own was blank. George Eliot (1876) [1] Librarians, booksellers and publishers like books that can be conveniently classified. Books on science go on one shelf. Books on science politics go on another [2, 3]. Most students encounter science first, and read books that give no inkling of the underlying politics. This has been described as “… an enormous problem of which students, or people who look only at standard textbooks and sanitized histories of science, are usually unaware. … You get the impression that the history of science is a totally progressive, orderly, logical development of ideas” [4]. To some extent the science literature has tended to become a pat-on-the- back literature. To pass the peer-review gate, authors are inclined to paint a rosy picture, avoid controversy, and positively emphasize the work of possi- ble gatekeepers. An exception is where controversy is exploited in a holier- than-thou literature that attempts to slip flawed arguments by the reader, while criticizing easy targets (such as people who are no longer alive), and admonishing the reader to avoid unsavoury authors who try to slip flawed arguments by. Students will inevitably learn about science politics in their later years if they become engaged in one of the most exciting aspects of science – the construction of hypotheses based on prevailing knowledge, and the mak- ing of discoveries that extend or refute that knowledge. Percepts All scientific knowledge rests on hypotheses. Immanuel Kant argued that percepts without concepts are blind [5]. This point was also made by physi- ologist John Scott Haldane when writing in 1891 about his uncle, John Bur- don Sanderson, a mentor to Romanes [6]: D.R. Forsdyke, Evolutionary Bioinformatics, DOI 10.1007/978-1-4419-7771-7, 391 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2011 392 Epilogue [He] would say ... that he is very tolerant about theories -- [but] that what really tells is facts. But then what are facts that are essential? It’s the theory that determines that. I would simply disregard as trivial and mislead- ing heaps of things which he considers essential, and vice-versa. And even the simplest ‘facts’ are expressed - perceived - through theory. We perceive facts in the context of theory. Theories themselves, until the evidence becomes overwhelming (e.g. the theory that the earth is not flat), are unsubstantiated theories, or mere hypotheses. In an ideal world, compet- ing hypotheses would be dispassionately analyzed and the selection of one rather than another would be made with much diffidence (see Appendix 3). Darwin in 1868 set the standard [7]: “It is a relief to have some feasible explanation of the various facts, which can be given up as soon as any better hypothesis is found.” Torch Passed But we do not live in an ideal world. In an ideal world, the ideas advanced by Gregor Mendel in 1865 would have been selected by scientists worldwide as a basis for further experimentation. By 1870 the ideas would have entered university-level biology curricula and students at Cambridge, such as Ro- manes and Bateson, would have read Mendel along with their Darwin. Yet, as has been told many times, had Mendel never lived progress in genetics would not have been much affected [8]. Thankfully his work was preserved or we would not now know of it. But, alas, preservation does not necessarily lead to selection. At least, in the years before the independent discovery of Mendel’s laws in 1900, his work was not castigated: For historians there remains the baffling enigma of how such distin- guished biologists as …W. Bateson … could rest satisfied with such a crassly inadequate theory. ... The irony with which we must now read W. Bateson’s dismissal of Darwin is almost painful. This remark in 1983 by Richard Dawkins, deservedly one of the most influ- ential scientists of our times, is representative of the multiplicity of attacks on William Bateson that occurred both before and after his death in 1926 [9]. It cannot be said that progress in genetics would not have been affected had Romanes and Bateson never lived. Their many contributions have been acknowledged and extended. However, Bateson’s detractors repeatedly pro- claimed that, through his refusal to accept the conventional genic wisdom, he had delayed progress in genetics. I have argued both here and in my other books that, to the contrary, Bateson was light-years ahead of his contempo- raries and of many who came after. It is his detractors who may have delayed progress [10, 11]. Nevertheless, the Batesonian torch was passed through the To Preserve is Not To Select 393 twentieth century by Richard Goldschmidt, by Gregory Bateson, by Michael White, and, with qualifications, by paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould. In an article entitled “The Uses of Heresy,” Gould in 1982 introduced a re- print of Goldschmidt’s classic text The Material Basis of Evolution. Here Gould described “the counterattack” of the neo-Darwinians that included his Harvard colleague Ernst Mayr’s despair at the “total neglect” by Gold- schmidt of the “overwhelming and convincing evidence” against his ideas [12]. In Gould’s opinion Goldschmidt “suffered the worst fate of all: to be ridiculed and unread” [Gould’s italics], although his “general vision” was held to be “uncannily correct (or at least highly fruitful at the moment),” and “interesting and coherent, even if unacceptable today.” In 1980 Gould himself had came close to embracing the Batesonian- Goldschmidtian argument in an article in the journal Paleobiology entitled: “Is a new and general theory of evolution emerging?”[13]. But, after a two decade struggle with both the evolution establishment and cancer, Gould recanted, while still maintaining “a hierarchical theory of selection.” In his The Structure of Evolutionary Thought, published shortly before his death in 2002, he wrote [14]: I do not, in fact and retrospect (but not in understatement), regard this 1980 paper as among the strongest … that I have ever written … . I then read the literature on speciation as beginning to favor sympatric alterna- tives to allopatric orthodoxies at substantial relative frequency, and I pre- dicted that views on this subject would change substantially, particularly towards favoring mechanisms that would be regarded as rapid even in microevolutionary time. I now believe that I was wrong in this prediction. Generally courteous when responding to those who did not share his evolutionary views, Gould, like Romanes a century earlier, characterized his many opponents as “ultraDarwinian” fundamentalists, to be contrasted with his few “pluralist” supporters. There are remarkable parallels between Gould and Romanes [15, 16]. Both were of the establishment and center-stage. Steeped in the substance and history of evolutionary science, their writings were welcomed by the leading journals of their days. Both wrote prolifically for the general public, as well as for scientists. Both faced attacks from the very top of their profession – Romanes from Huxley, Wallace Thiselton-Dyer and Lankester – Gould from Dawkins, Mayr and Maynard Smith. Sadly, both were stricken with cancer in their forties. A difference was that, with modern therapies, Gould survived another two decades, whereas Romanes died at age forty-six. Furthermore, Romanes never recanted and, I suspect, never would have, even if given extra time. Gould was strongly tested in 1995 by John Maynard Smith, the “Dean of British ultra-Darwinians” [17]: 394 Epilogue Gould occupies a rather curious position, particularly on his side of the Atlantic. Because of the excellence of his essays, he has come to be seen by non-biologists as the pre-eminent evolutionary theorist. In contrast, the evolutionary biologists with whom I have discussed his work tend to see him as a man whose ideas are so confused as to be hardly worth bothering with, but as one who should not be publicly criticized because he is at least on our side against the creationists. All this would not matter, were it not that he is giving non-biologists a largely false picture of the state of evolutionary theory. In the USA Mayr protested that Gould and his allies “quite conspicuously misrepresent the views of [biology’s] leading spokesmen.” Other evolution- ists were less restrained [18]: Evolutionary biology is relevant to a large number of fields – medicine, neuroscience, psychology, psychiatry, cognitive science, molecular biology, etc. – that sometimes have an impact on human welfare. Many scientists in these fields look to Gould, as America’s most famous evolutionist, for reliable guidance on his field, and so the cumulative effect of Gould’s ‘steady misrepresentation’ has been to prevent the great majority of leading scientists in these disciplines from learning about, or profiting from, the rapid series of advances made in evolutionary biology over the last thirty years. It seems not to have occurred to these critics that if Gould had, in fact, pro- vided “reliable guidance,” then it will be their “steady misrepresentation” that will have negatively impacted human welfare. While some biohistorians have expressed dissatisfaction with the prevailing orthodoxy [19, 20], follow- ing Gould’s demise it was left largely to scientists such as Patrick Bateson (a relative of William and Gregory) and myself, to bear the torch onward into the twenty first century [10, 11, 21]. The task is now a little easier because, as has been shown here, we can begin to flesh out the Batesonian- Goldschmidtian abstractions in both informatic and chemical terms. Voting with Facts The ground was well prepared when Watson and Crick presented their model for DNA structure in 1953.

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